Tuesday 30 January 2018

Words


I hate when we have two words for essentially the same thing.

Take two everyday words, like stalactite and stalagmite.

One is a limestone formation that grows down from the ceiling of a cave, the other is one that grows up from the floor. But which is which? Who the fuck can remember?

They're the same damn thing, except one's on the ceiling and one's on the floor. Can't we just pick one word, say stalactite, and then say "hanging stalactite"? If we don't say "hanging", guess what? It's on the floor. Is that difficult to understand?

I know people who invent silly rhymes and memory games to recall which is which. If you're going to do that, why not save time and go with "hanging"?

Believe it or not, over the holidays I was actually discussing stalactites. I haven't been on that topic in over 20 years. And I like to think I have my geological formations down, but how the fuck am I suppose to get those two words straight? Like I said, it's been over 20 years.

Here's a rational way to think about it. Take a man's dick. Sometimes it's hanging towards the floor and sometimes it's growing up towards the ceiling. Do we have different terms for that? Do we say "dicktite" and "dickmite". We don't!

By the way, when people create memory games to recall things, we call that a mnemonic. Now why the hell isn't that spelled like pneumonia? Or phone. Why not fhone? Who knows?

It's so confusing.

Phuck!